Coronation Summer

by Margaret Pemberton

  Zac Hemingway’s grin deepened. He didn’t have dimples, but he did have a very attractive cleft in his chin. Despite her fury at his cavalier attitude, Carrie couldn’t help wondering if anyone ever told him he was a dead ringer for Kirk Douglas, the American film star. She shoved her work-roughened hands deep into the capacious pockets of her wrap-around apron, wishing she wasn’t wearing it but not liking to take it off in case he took it as an invitation to make himself even more at home than he already had done.

  ‘Queenie will be expecting you,’ she said tartly as he made no sign of moving, ‘and I’ve got things to do. A dinner to cook—’

  ‘If you had the lamb chops in mind, I’m afraid I have a confession to make,’ he said, beginning to walk down the passageway towards her. He moved with the well-knit, springy precision of a born athlete, and Carrie stepped hastily up onto the bottom step of her stairs in order that he wouldn’t have to squeeze past her to reach the front door.

  ‘And what’s that?’ she asked, trying to keep her mind on the conversation and, as he drew abreast of her on the other side of the banisters, finding it infuriatingly difficult.

  Even though his hands were now plunged carelessly in his trouser pockets, his biceps bulged magnificently, and from beneath his open-necked cotton shirt was a glimpse of a chest so deep and powerfully muscled she couldn’t help wildly wondering what he would look like semi-naked in a boxing ring.

  ‘Danny said, as I hadn’t eaten, I could help myself to anything I found,’ he continued, not looking at all abashed by the admission he was making, ‘and the chops were too inviting to ignore.’

  She grasped hold of the coat-covered newel post, gaping at him incredulously. ‘You ate my Danny’s dinner?’ She couldn’t believe it. ‘You helped yourself to my lamb chops?’

  He gave a slight, almost Gallic shrug of his massive shoulders. He was so near now that she could see the colour of his eyes. They weren’t blue, as she had expected. They were grey, very clear and light and violently alive. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ he said with disarming honesty. ‘Danny didn’t want them. He said he was going to call in at the jellied eel shop for some pie and mash.’

  Carrie gritted her teeth. That bloomin’ husband of hers! If he’d been within hitting distance she’d have swatted him with the nearest heavy object. ‘Well . . . as you weren’t to know any differently . . .’ she began stiffly, feeling as if she had somehow been wrong-footed and not quite knowing how.

  ‘That’s very understanding of you.’ He sounded soberly sincere but there was a gleam in his eyes that belied the tone of his voice, and a muscle was twitching at the side of his mouth.

  He was laughing at her. Carrie knew he was laughing at her. In stony silence she watched as he picked up the jacket that was hanging on the sitting-room doorknob.

  He hooked it with his thumb, swinging it over his shoulder, saying, ‘Seeing as how you’re Danny’s missus, I wouldn’t want to have got off on the wrong foot with you.’

  Carrie remained frozen-faced, pointedly waiting for him to leave. With another slight shrug of his shoulders he turned away from her, walking to the front door. It was still wide open and as he stepped out onto her scrubbed, white-stoned doorstep he paused, turning towards her, saying reflectively, ‘Just as a matter of interest, when you’ve got such a lovely voice why did you speak like a fishwife when you first came in the house and you thought only Danny was home?’ Not waiting for a reply, which was just as well because Carrie was speechless with disbelief, he flashed her his wide, dazzling smile, gave her a wink, and strode off down the garden path and the square towards number nine.

  Very slowly, with legs like jelly, Carrie sat down on her stairs. The impertinence of the man. The bare-faced, insolent impertinence! And he hadn’t only been impertinent: unless she was very much mistaken, Zac Hemingway, who could be no more than twenty-seven or twenty-eight, had been flirting with her. She pushed her untidy, deeply waving hair back away from her face, aware that her cheeks were flying scarlet banners. What on earth would Danny say when she told him? Would he even believe her? From her viewpoint opposite the open door she saw a lithe, dearly loved figure approaching her gate. Seconds later her precious daughter was rushing into the house, saying with breathless concern, ‘Gosh, Mum! What are you doing sitting on the stairs with your face all red! You’re not having a hot flush, are you?’

  ‘No, I’m not!’ Carrie said indignantly, rising to her feet. ‘I’m thirty-five, you cheeky young madam, not forty-five!’ She led the way into the kitchen, crossly aware that, for the first time in her life, she had sounded a lot like Mavis. She filled the kettle for a cup of tea. Zac Hemingway had a lot to answer for, by crikey he had!

  *

  The Embassy Boxing Club was humming with activity. ‘So when’s this new bloke going to put in an appearance?’ Danny Collins asked his boss. ‘It’s half past seven. The natives are getting restless.’

  The natives were the youngsters from St Mark’s Church Scout Group, nearly all of them in shorts and boxing gloves; a hefty proportion of Magnolia Square’s elderly and female residents, all perched on whatever rickety chairs or benches The Swan’s landlord had thoughtfully provided; and the hard core of bruisingly fit young men who were fast making the club a force to be reckoned with.

  ‘He’ll put in an appearance in his own good time,’ Jack Robson said easily, ‘or he will if he hasn’t fallen asleep on your sofa. What did you make of him when you met him?’

  They were talking in the small partitioned-off booth in the corner of the gym that served Jack as an office. Danny, dressed in a singlet and shabby flannels with a grubby towel slung around his shoulders, was a man whose physical strength lay in tough wiriness, not physical bulk. His slightly faded mahogany-red hair was cropped close to his head, giving him the look of an ex-jailbird which, more by luck than management, he wasn’t.

  Jack Robson was a very different kettle of fish. He wasn’t overly tall, but the sense of barely reined-in power he exuded made most people think he was well over six foot. All through the war he had fought in the Commandos, and though he had allowed the peak of physical fitness he had reached in his commando days to ebb slightly, he was still, for a man only four years away from forty, unnervingly hard-muscled. Wearing one of the slick suits he was so fond of, with a straight, handsome mouth and with dark curly hair still untouched by grey, he was also devastatingly attractive – and, if appearances were anything to go by, happily married. It was a combination that drove many of the young women who frequented the club wild.

  Danny rubbed his chin thoughtfully, saying, ‘I dunno really, Jack. ’E certainly looks as if ’e could lift a double-decker bus with ’is tiny finger, but ’e’s a bit on the pretty side. If ’e’s such dynamite in the ring, ’ow come ’e ain’t got a broken nose or a cauliflower ear?’

  Jack grinned and adjusted the framed photograph that graced the battered table that served as his desk. ‘Because he is dynamite in the ring. He’s as fast as greased lightning and so light on his feet you’d think he was bantam-weight, not heavyweight.’ His eyes lingered on the photograph. It had been taken on the promenade at Margate last summer. The sea breeze was tugging at Christina’s cloud of smoke-dark, shoulder-length hair, but she didn’t have her head thrown back, laughing with full-throated enjoyment as most south-east London girls did when having a good time at the seaside. Instead, her head was slightly to one side, her heavy-lashed eyes unreadable, her slight smile as tantalizing and as enigmatic as that of the Mona Lisa.

  ‘’E’ll ’ave to be light on ’is bloody feet if ’e’s goin’ to fight unlicensed as well as legit,’ Danny was saying.

  Jack dragged his thoughts away from Christina, wishing she would come down to the club, if only occasionally; wishing her reason for not doing so wasn’t because she was sitting at home reading or sewing, but because she was minding a houseful of kids. ‘I’ve seen him work out, I’ve seen him fight, and he’s gold, Danny, pure gold,’ he said, rammin
g the pain of his and Christina’s childlessness to the back of his mind. ‘But until he turns up let’s keep our visitors happy, shall we? Get Big Jumbo sparring with Tommy. That should keep the old biddies and girls quiet for a bit.’

  Danny grinned and turned to go, walking smack into Mavis as he did so.

  ‘Steady on, I’ve only got the one chest and I don’t want you squashing it flat,’ Mavis said, stepping back from the encounter and tugging a skin-tight scarlet sweater down over her hips as if, somehow, it had become disarranged.

  ‘It’d be easier to flatten two ferrets in a sack than to flatten your chest, Mavis gal,’ Danny said with the easy familiarity that came of his being her brother-in-law and of his having known her ever since he could walk.

  ‘Sod off,’ Mavis retorted amicably and then, as he obligingly did so, transferring her attention to Jack. ‘So where’s the boy wonder?’ she asked, hoisting her tight skirt up a little so that she could perch on the corner of his desk. ‘Everyone thought he’d be doin’ a bit of training tonight.’

  ‘I reckon he will be.’ His mouth tugged into a smile. ‘He’s not on a ball and chain, you know.’

  ‘Lucky old him.’ Mavis looked directly into his eyes. ‘I wish everyone I knew could say the same.’

  Jack’s smile died. He looked suddenly every one of his thirty-six years. ‘Leave off, love,’ he said wearily. ‘There’s no point and well you know it.’

  ‘There could be.’ There was no mistaking the depth of emotion in Mavis’s voice. ‘We’re not kids any more, Jack. It’s not as if we don’t know what we’re about. You’ve known ever since we were at school how I bloomin’ well feel about you, and—’

  ‘Sorry to interrupt,’ Danny said cheerily, putting his head round the corner of the booth, ‘only Zac’s arrived, Jack. Thought you’d like to know.’

  ‘Thanks Danny.’ Jack touched Mavis briefly on the shoulder and walked out into the noisy mayhem of his gym.

  Danny hesitated before following him. ‘Ain’t yer coming to cast yer mince-pies over the new arrival, Mavis?’

  Mavis didn’t move from where she was sitting on the corner of the makeshift desk. ‘Is he worth it?’ she asked desultorily.

  Danny grinned. ‘From your point of view I reckon ’e is.’

  Mavis looked at the photograph Jack had been toying with. Christina’s black-lashed eyes, in a face unmistakably foreign and undeniably beautiful, met hers, their expression as unrevealing as those of a sphinx.

  ‘I suppose I might as well,’ she said bleakly. ‘I’m certainly not making any headway anywhere else.’

  ‘I can’t go to the club to see the new boxer spar,’ fifteen-year-old Daisy Emmerson said to twenty-one-year-old Billy Lomax as they stood on the pavement outside number sixteen. ‘Not when we’ve got such trouble on at home.’ Daisy hadn’t been born an Emmerson. Bombed out in the war, her family killed, she’d been taken in by Kate and, when Kate married Leon, had been adopted by them. From that moment on she had very rightly considered herself to be every inch an Emmerson, and anyone foolish enough to point out that Leon Emmerson couldn’t possibly be her dad, his skin colour being so very different to her own, received very short shrift indeed. He was her legal dad and he loved her and cherished her, and if that wasn’t enough to make him her dad in the fullest sense of the word, then Daisy didn’t know what was.

  ‘But it isn’t real trouble, is it?’ Billy said reasonably. ‘Matthew’s only run away from school. Crikey, if my mum thought she’d ’ad real trouble on ’er ’ands every time I ran away from school, she’d ’ave grey hair by now!’

  At the thought of Mavis with grey hair a smile twitched at the corners of Daisy’s mouth. Mavis Lomax would have to be in a box six feet under before she allowed her hair to go grey!

  ‘Things aren’t quite the same at our house as they are at yours,’ she said, pointing out the obvious in the kindest way possible. Her house was ordered, welcoming and full of laughter, with very rarely any crossness and never any shouting. Billy’s house was welcoming too, in a ramshackle way, but it was far from being ordered, and shouting and laughter followed so bewilderingly hard on each other’s heels that Daisy often felt quite dizzy. ‘Matthew’s school isn’t exactly a local school that’s just around the corner,’ she continued. ‘Somerset is miles away, and Matthew’s been missing for twenty-four hours now. Mum and Dad are frantic.’

  For Daisy’s sake, Billy tried to understand what seemed to him to be an unnecessary over-reaction. ‘’E’s probably just scarpered off with a mate for a bit of a good time,’ he said, well aware that if he had ever had access to the kind of money Matthew probably had access to, he would most definitely have scarpered off, and done so regularly and on a right royal basis! He dug his hands as deep in the pockets of his tight-fitting trousers as they would go, which wasn’t far, wondering just how much money Matthew had inherited a few years ago when his great-grandfather died. It would have been a packet, he knew that. Old man Harvey, of the Harvey Construction Company, had been stinking rich, and as his son had been killed in the First World War and his grandson in the Second World War, young Matthew had come in for the lot.

  The money hadn’t made any difference to the way the Emmersons lived, though. ‘Why should it?’ Daisy said to him when he once brought the subject up. ‘It’s Matthew’s money, not Mum and Dad’s. His school fees come out of it, but I don’t think anything else does. There’s executors and trustees, and he has to be educated as his great-grandfather wanted and he has to keep in touch with his Harvey relations. There’s a great-aunt in Somerset and another aunt here in London, in Kensington. It’s all very complicated. It’s not simple, like winning the pools.’

  She said now, ‘Matthew wouldn’t run off just for a bit of fun. Not when he’d know how Mum and Dad would worry.’

  Seeing the anxiety in her eyes and hearing it in her voice stabbed his heart something rotten. He took hold of her hand, drawing her a little closer towards him. ‘I’ll walk you back ’ome,’ he said gruffly, for all the world as if number four was a good mile away. ‘Mebbe there’ll be some news. Mebbe ’e’s already back at school.’

  She squeezed his hand gratefully and his heart soared. He was potty about Daisy Emmerson. She was so dainty and neat, with her cap of shiny blue-black hair and flawless, creamy skin. It just wasn’t possible to imagine Daisy having spots, or unpolished shoes, or grubby marks on her skirt. ‘Band-box fresh’ was how he’d heard one of their elderly neighbours describe her, and it was a phrase he had never forgotten. Even as a young hooligan, he always knew she would one day be his girl. For years she’d been too young for him to have done anything about it, but she wasn’t too young now. She was fifteen and he had every intention of putting their long-term friendship on another, more satisfactory footing just as soon as he possibly could.

  The trouble was, he brooded to himself as they walked up the square past the twilight-shrouded church, a girl like Daisy had to be treated with respect. She wasn’t the sort of girl that could be taken round the back of the local bike shed for a kiss and a cuddle and, if he were lucky, something more. Nor did he want her to be. What he wanted from his relationship with Daisy was something so special he daren’t put it into words, not even to himself.

  As they turned in at her garden gate they saw that the front door was open and that eleven-year-old Luke was seated unhappily at the top of the short flight of steps leading up to it, his elbows on his knees, his chin in his hands.

  ‘There’s no news,’ he said to them glumly as they walked up the steps towards him. ‘Mr Giles is here now. Dad wants to go to Somerset to look for Matthew, but Mr Giles doesn’t think it’s a good idea. He doesn’t think Matthew will still be in Somerset. He thinks he’ll be on his way to London.’

  He was a good-looking boy, his skin colour a dusky coffee, his hair a tightly curling mop, his eyes, like his father’s, brown and gold-flecked. His finely modelled cheekbones and well-shaped mouth were, however, carbon copies of his mother’s
cheekbones and mouth, and the combination, in the eyes of the girls in his class at school, was sensationally distinctive.

  He said now, as Billy and Daisy sat down on either side of him, Daisy reluctant to go into the house when the vicar was with her mum and dad, Billy reluctant to leave Daisy until he absolutely had to, ‘I don’t understand it. Matthew never does anything wrong. And he liked school, I dunno why, but he did.’

  ‘Mebbe he’s got a new teacher ’e doesn’t like,’ Billy suggested helpfully. ‘A new teacher can’t ’alf make life miserable.’

  Luke, who’d never had any trouble getting on with his teachers, despite his lack of enthusiasm for schoolwork, remained silent. He knew Billy was trying to be helpful but Billy didn’t know Matthew the way he and Daisy knew Matthew. And he and Daisy knew that even if Matthew wasn’t getting on with a teacher, he wouldn’t simply have run away. He’d have spoken to their dad about it. Their dad would soon have sorted it out. Their dad might be black and only a Thames waterman, but he wasn’t frightened of anyone, not even of the snobby teachers at Matthew’s posh school.

  There came the sound of someone walking down the hall towards the open doorway and Luke turned his head, expecting to see Mr Giles, but it wasn’t Mr Giles, it was his dad.

  ‘I thought I heard Billy’s voice,’ Leon said as Billy rose hurriedly to his feet. ‘How are you, Billy? Is the business doing all right?’

  Billy’s business was a scrap-metal yard that Jack Robson had loaned him the money to buy, and it was typical of Leon that, despite his frantic anxiety over Matthew, he took time to ask Billy how business was doing.

  ‘It’s doing great,’ Billy replied truthfully. ‘I’ve just made a deal with the council for all the piping from the old prefabs. They’re starting demolition next week.’